{"id":10057,"date":"2024-05-01T22:38:46","date_gmt":"2024-05-01T21:38:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10057"},"modified":"2024-05-01T22:38:46","modified_gmt":"2024-05-01T21:38:46","slug":"x-men-34-annotations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=10057","title":{"rendered":"X-Men #34 annotations"},"content":{"rendered":"

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>X-MEN vol 6 #34<\/strong>
\n“Love-Hate”<\/strong>
\nWriter: Gerry Duggan<\/strong>
\nArtist: Joshua Cassara<\/strong>
\nColour artist: Romulo Fajardo Jr<\/strong>
\nLetterer: Clayton Cowles<\/strong>
\nDesign: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen<\/strong>
\nEditor: Jordan D White<\/strong><\/p>\n

COVER \/ PAGE 1.<\/strong> Assorted cast members in front of Krakoa. On the left, Cypher is in the branches, and below him we have Firestar, Forge, Synch, Talon, Magneto, Wolverine and Shadowkat. On the right are Sunfire, Polaris, Magik, Emma Frost, Apocalypse, and a reunited Scott and Jean.<\/p>\n

PAGE 2. <\/strong>Paul Neary obituary.<\/p>\n

PAGE 3. <\/strong>A montage of Professor X.<\/em><\/p>\n

Panel 1 shows him with the original X-Men in the very early Silver Age. At least, Iceman’s appearance suggests the very early Silver Age; Scott and Jean are holding hands, but they didn’t become a couple until long after the X-Men dumped the black and yellow uniforms.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Panel 2 is Professor X in the foreground of Krakoa, specifically the Green Lagoon bar, in happier days. In the background, from left to right, we have Black Tom Cassidy, the Blob, Penance \/ M, Apocalypse, a character who I think is probably meant to be Guido, Emma Frost, Jean Grey, Cyclops, Magneto, Colossus, Mystique Destiny, Domino and Forge. The choice of characters is quite heavy on cast members from X-Force<\/em>, which artist Joshua Cassara also worked on.<\/p>\n

Panel 3 is an inverted image (subtle!) of Professor X as an ally of Orchis, as seen in the current issues of Fall of the House of X<\/em> and Rise of the Powers of X<\/em>, with Omega Sentinel in the background.<\/p>\n

PAGES 4-5. <\/strong>MODOK arrives in New York.<\/em><\/p>\n

The narrator is recapping the current position of the plot in Fall of the House of X<\/em>.<\/p>\n

We last saw MODOK fleeing the Orchis space station in Fall of the House of X<\/em> #2. He’s still wearing his space helmet from that issue, so apparently he’s come straight here. It’s not the first time we’ve seen Orchis concealing their activities in New York barges – there’s another one in Cable<\/em> #1. MODOK’s plan for this issue seems to boil down to causing chaos for the hell of it, or maybe to test another of his experiments. He might just be amusing himself while waiting to see if the world ends. But he’s also torching Orchis’ remaining reputation in New York, deliberately or otherwise.<\/p>\n

PAGE 6. <\/strong>Recap and credits.<\/p>\n

PAGES 7-8. <\/strong>Some Orchis soldiers attack the Daily Bugle.<\/em><\/p>\n

Ben Urich’s captions still echo Frank Miller’s Daredevil<\/em> run.<\/p>\n

These particular Orchis soldiers seem to have snapped even before MODOK affects them, presumably on seeing Orchis collapse around them. As usual in a Gerry Duggan X-Men story, Firestar seems entirely untroubled at killing them.<\/p>\n

PAGES 9-10. <\/strong>Ms Marvel and Wolverine (Laura) fight other Orchis soldiers.<\/em><\/p>\n

Pretty straightforward. Let’s assume Ms Marvel’s weird grin is her trying to be upbeat for the civilians.<\/p>\n

PAGES 11-12. <\/strong>Shadowkat rescues Caliban.<\/em><\/p>\n

Emma updates the mutants on Professor X’s involvement with Orchis. You might question quite what the morale advantage is of doing that, since Emma’s unlikely to be that committed to honesty for its own sake, but maybe she’s figuring that Nimrod will make the alliance known to mutants sooner or later anyway.<\/p>\n

Caliban<\/strong> was last seen in issues #15-17, where Forge used him to create a living mutant-tracking harness for use against the Children of the Vault. We’re told that he’s been in Orchis custody throughout “Fall of X”, having failed to get through a gate in time. He’s apparently been asleep, since he doesn’t even know whether they’ve been experimenting on him. (Given his ability to track mutants, the answer is almost certainly yes.)<\/p>\n

Shadowkat’s claim that Professor X “stoped us from fighting and winning the night of the Gala” is extremely questionable – the X-Men didn’t invent a cure to Orchis’ poisoning of Krakoan medicines until months later, and Orchis had already decimated them with pure force even before using that leverage – but she’s evidently of a mind to blame Charles for what’s been happening of late.<\/p>\n

PAGES 13-19.<\/strong> The X-Men defeat MODOK.<\/em><\/p>\n

“That’s not my name!” <\/strong>MODOK stands for Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing; MODOK seems to be objecting to Firestar calling him a “machine”. And indeed he isn’t one – that’s why he’s not with the AI contingent of Orchis.<\/p>\n

“You only fight the X-Men once.”<\/strong> He’s literally fought them before in this series, in issue #8. They gave him a rap on the knuckles and told him to be nicer in future. And Laura was there.<\/p>\n

\n

Synch and Wolverine.<\/b> This is the first time we\u2019ve seen Synch with Laura since her older duplicate Talon, Synch\u2019s partner, died in issue #31. (Strictly, Laura is a duplicate of Talon, not the other way around, but I suspect that\u2019ll be quietly forgotten about.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

PAGES 20-23.\u00a0<\/strong>Shadowkat and Wolverine.<\/em><\/p>\n

This feels like another rather accelerated subplot, but the idea is clear enough: Caliban is playing the trusting innocent role that he played with Forge in issues #15-17, but gets to be less naive here than usual and to serve as a moral anchor who wants to see the X-Men behave like proper superheroes. Shadowkat’s routine of taking refuge in the dark ninja act finally collapses when confronted with that response, and then with the more authentic version of the act in Wolverine (Logan); she apparently decides that she wants out of this life, which presumably leads into her post-Krakoa status quo.<\/p>\n

She hands over her sword to Wolverine; this is one of the two swords she retrieved from the X-Men Mansion in issue #25, apparently gifted to her by Ogun.<\/p>\n

Most of the illuminated signs on the final page are in Japanese (which I can’t read), but one of them is in Krakoan. It says THANK YOU (mis-spelled with the T and H as separate characters). This is Duggan and Cassara’s last full issue – issue #35, the final issue of the run, is also legacy number #700 and features contributions from a long list of creators.<\/p>\n

PAGE 24.\u00a0<\/strong>Trailers. The Krakoan reads TO ME MY X-MEN.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As always, this post contains spoilers, and page numbers go by the digital edition. X-MEN vol 6 #34 “Love-Hate” Writer: Gerry Duggan Artist: Joshua Cassara Colour artist: Romulo Fajardo Jr Letterer: Clayton Cowles Design: Tom Muller & Jay Bowen Editor: Jordan D White COVER \/ PAGE 1. Assorted cast members in front of Krakoa. On […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annotations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10057"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10059,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10057\/revisions\/10059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}